Forsaken
by Mark of the Asphodel
Summary: There is no peace in victory for a fallen knight. Abel immerses himself in the search for Est, and loses himself in the process. Post-FE3.


**Forsaken**

Disclaimer: I do not own _Fire Emblem_ or any of its characters.

Warning: This story is part of a series of post-FE3 'fics of mine called "Tales of the Unified Kingdom," which exist in the same timeline, wherein FE3 has been retconned to accommodate _Shadow Dragon._ This, like the other stories in the series, can be read as a standalone. This story is somewhat depressing, in a manner appropriate to FE3.

***

He comes into this town the same way he has all the others. He stops at the shrine to ask the local cleric if any lost persons, any travelers, have passed through recently. When the cleric cannot help him, he asks to visit the graveyard and the charnel house, and there he questions the diggers. Did they ever come across a particular young woman, small-framed and slender without being frail, with short hair the color of rose gold? The diggers shake their heads; they have never seen such a person, dead or otherwise. From there he goes to the inns and the taverns and poses his questions to the innkeepers and barmaids. They, too, have no recollection of any such girl. Even the sketch he presents them, drawn from his own memory, spurs no memory of theirs.

His shoulders no longer slump in frustration when he gives up his questions for the night; instead, he gives patronage to the townspeople who failed to help him. He buys drinks and supper from the last barmaid, takes a room at the final inn. For once, he can pay his own way in the town; he chanced across a small casket of gold and jewels half-buried in the sand on the road from Khadein, and it will see him through this night and at least the next several. He signs his true name in the inn's register: _Abel_. Abel Nothing, Abel from Nowhere. Just a man passing through.

He has exhausted every possibility in this town, this mud-brick desert village known as Memfi. In the morning, he will take his lance and his sack of personal effects, saddle his horse, and set out again on the road northward to Thabes. For the moment, he falls into a black and unsettled sleep.

*

He lost Est in the great mountains of Macedon. Her pegasus disappeared into the mist, white blending into white, even as he galloped below, shouting her name. He kept riding into the blank expanse of fog until he and his mount were on the verge of collapse, and when he stumbled into a small military outpost, the garrison there kept him in the infirmary for two straight days. After that, the trail was cold, and he could only guess as to Est's whereabouts.

Abel searched the length and breadth of Macedon, and the heights of it too, confident that his wife sought refuge in her homeland. Refuge against what, he truly didn't know. She left without telling him why, and he could only surmise she was escaping a traitor's embrace. There was probably some adage about that in Macedon, Macedonians being as adage-happy a people as any Abel knew. It would run something like, "A knight who betrays his lord makes a husband certain to betray his wife." He couldn't deny the charge, couldn't escape the label that followed him from Altea to the Dragon's Dale; in an army filled with men and women who'd turned their loyalties at least once, Abel bore the traitor's brand on behalf of them all. It didn't take long for Abel to realize that Prince Marth's mercy, which spared Abel death and allowed him to once again bear arms for Altea, was its own kind of prison. It didn't take long for Abel to realize that his fellow Alteans-- once close to him as brothers-- had formed the opinion that he ought to fall on his own sword and save them the trouble of dealing with him. His only defense was that he'd committed treason for Est, because he couldn't bear to lose her; the defense barely worked with Est's own sisters, much less anyone else. Even Princess Caeda, devout romantic that she was, found Abel's motives incomprehensible.

"Prince Marth's mission matters more than any of our lives," she said with teeth flashing through her honeyed smile, and Abel understood well what she actually meant by it.

It took Abel entirely too long to realize that Est was flying away from him.

"My wife, have you seen her? She's a few fingers over five feet tall, slender but not too thin, with hair like copper mixed into gold."

He produced a sketch of Est, in case his words couldn't communicate the point of her chin, the exact curve of her cheek, the look of delight that once sparkled in her eyes. The sketch proved helpful in Macedon-- to a point. These people knew Est of the Whitewinged Order on sight, and yet no one could direct him to her. They couldn't all be lying, unless all Macedon had turned to one vast conspiracy to keep Abel's wife from him, and Abel knew enough of Macedon to know these people couldn't keep a conspiracy together to save themselves.

He then sailed to Grust. Est had spent considerable time there, when she was a young knight under orders of the Dolhr-Grust alliance, and perhaps she had friends, or old comrades, who might give her shelter. He searched the forts, the villages, the scattered farms and the beachcombers' huts, the secret hiding places used by resistance fighters during the wars. It was the same story in Grust-- while many remembered Est from earlier days, none had seen her anytime recently.

In northern Grust, near the Chiasmir straits, he had one moment of hope. A tavern owner narrowed her eyes at Abel's charcoal sketch.

"There was a girl who looked a bit like that, came through not a fortnight ago."

His spirits rose and then sank sharply as the tavern owner described the girl-- a slender lass, with the bearing and speech of a soldier. Strong Macedonian accent. Steady blue eyes.

"Are you certain her eyes were blue?"

"Aye, and her hair as well. Blue-black, like the wing of a raven."

Catria. One of the three people Abel wanted to see least in the world. Of those three, the most likely to take aim at him with her sword. His other sister-in-law was equally unwanted but less of a danger; Palla would at least speak to him, would give Abel a chance to explain himself, to explain how he'd failed as a husband _and_ a knight. In Catria's eyes, Abel knew he was now damned twice over. He finished his inquiries in Grust and took the next ship east to Talys. He could not think now where Est might logically be, but Talys was a good place to hide and an unlikely place to encounter Est's sisters.

Est was not in Talys. Abel spent what gold he had left to sail back to the mainland and there continued his search.

Abel found his options for work limited in this new Unified Kingdom of Archanea. The days of mercenary armies were over; Dark Emperor Hardin's reliance on mercenaries and the damage they wrought had disgraced the profession. Most of the old noble houses had fallen during one war or the other, so finding a place in service to some Duke or Marquess was not possible either. Rumors that the new king-- Abel's own former liege lord-- planned to consolidate and reorganize all existing armies under his own centralized command proved all too true, and Abel's already slim hopes of finding respectable work with his lance evaporated.

The onetime paladin found himself fighting on the arena circuit to earn his bread. There, he also earned himself a reputation as a peerless fighter who showed no mercy to his opponents. In truth, he went easy on them. He still possessed the strongest lance-arm in all Archanea, and could inflict more damage with a crude iron weapon than his opponents could with forged steel or even silver. Most arenas disallowed any such weapons, claiming the fight to be a pure test of skill, not of the fighter's willingness to buy himself a victory; Abel had the skill and string of victories to prove it. He permitted his opponents to draw blood, to give the appearance of a balanced match, but he never allowed them a win.

Thus he sustained himself-- fighting matches in the cities, using his winnings to comb the surrounding area for any trace of Est, and moving on to the next arena by the time his gold was exhausted. So it went until his renown trickled outside the fighting circuit and reached the wrong ears entirely.

"Mister Frey?"

Most arena fighters used assumed names. Abel responded to his own without hesitation, but his gut clenched with apprehension when he saw the livery of the messenger who addressed him.

"While the Crown does not, as a rule, approve of arena fighting, tales of your skill in the arena have reached the royal court. Queen Caeda wishes to extend to you an invitation to the Tournament of Valor, and hopes you will accept and find the royal tournament a more suitable proving ground for your talents than these corrupt fighting pits."

Abel took the letter between two fingers. The ivory parchment was thick and smooth, the wax seal crisp, the sealing-ribbon genuine silk. Even before reading it, he knew this was no joke, no fraud. He knew her signature and seal, and could even imagine a hint of her own perfume rising from the scroll.

"Yes, I must consider the offer. Though I must say this honor is far, far above me."

He left town before dawn, leaving the guise of Fearsome Frey behind him. Abel was surprised at how much it pained him to abandon that pseudonym, his tribute to a true hero of war who never saw the fruits of his sacrifice. When fighting as "Frey," Abel was able to forget, for a spell, that he was a worthless man stealing the name of a nobler one. In laying Fearsome Frey to rest, Abel quietly buried one of the remaining vestiges of his past.

Within the year, arena fighting was banned by royal decree. Abel had to scrape together some other means of earning gold. He acted as escort or bodyguard to wealthy ladies and spoiled children, taught the ways of the lance and the sword to the sons of merchants and artisans, even worked as a traveling peddler for a time. Nothing kept him in one place for long, as he was always on the hunt, eyes and ears open for any glimpse, any whisper, of Est. Wherever he went, it was the same set of questions. _Have you seen her? This girl, my wife, have you seen her? Is she here?_

The answers were always the same-- in Port Warren, Galder Harbor, Aurelis, in the former territories of House Leifcandith and House Adria, in the former kingdom of Gra. Undeterred, he continued to search every acre of the continent-- except for one island. He did not set foot in Altea. The place he and Est made their home, for so brief a time, was the last place she might go. It was also the last place Abel wanted to see.

In time, Abel noticed that the roads he traveled on were more broad and smooth than he remembered, that the towns of Aurelis and Old Archanea seemed larger than when he'd first passed through as a young cavalier, that strange new foodstuffs named earth-apples and love-apples appeared in market stalls. He noticed these changes only at the periphery of his consciousness, though. News of his old comrades penetrated deeper-- tales of the young Altean archer who was a bulwark of the new Free Knights of Archanea, praise for the Altean general who proved a wise and magnanimous governor of Grust, respect for the Altean paladin who made such a good steward of the realm whenever King Marth was occupied elsewhere on the continent. He heard of the love story between two Altean knights, valiant Dame Cecil and stalwart Sir Rody. And, of course, he heard a hundred stories of the exploits of the Hero King and his brilliant queen, most of which had truth to them and none of which Abel wanted to hear.

Once, he even heard fragments of his own story, sung by a bard around a village bonfire at festival time. Abel sat stone-faced, a cup of cider in his hand, as the bard spun out the tale of the Wayward Knight of Macedon and her faithless husband the Black Knight. By the end of the song, when knight and husband both had disappeared without a trace and Wayward Knight's two sisters were weeping for their lost member, tears trickled down Abel's own face. It did not give him away; many men in the gathering were inebriated enough to weep over the ballad. For Abel, the "tragical history" contained a horrible joke: the _Ballad of the Wayward Knight_ was the most he'd heard of Est in fifteen years.

*

Abel spends the night locked in dreams infused with memories of war, of armed men cascading through village streets. He wakes to find the sun already blazing through the high and narrow window of his room; often of late he sleeps far later than intended, as though the years of hard travel have begun to catch up with him. Abel listens briefly to the echoes of traffic in the streets; either Memfi changes character dramatically between morning and evening, or something is afoot. It sounds uncomfortably like a riot, and when Abel goes out to the street he is relieved to see neither soldiers nor any kind of armed brawl. People young and aged stream by, all seemingly on their way to the village plaza, summoned there by the call of a bell-tower. One youth of fourteen or so brushes past Abel, and Abel tugs at the boy's sleeve to get his attention.

"What is all the commotion, lad?"

"They're saying the king is dead, sir."

Abel lets go of the boy's garment, and the boy hurries away, disappearing into the crush of brightly-clad desert folk. He has lived with phantoms and rumors for so long that the news doesn't stir him; the death of the Hero King is less real to him than his last glimpse of Est in the mist. He merges into the river of foot-traffic, which bears him along at a relentless pace in the direction of the tolling bell. He reaches the plaza to hear the town cleric proclaim the accession of a boy whose name Abel has rarely heard, and whom Abel has never once seen. This, too, does not seem real to him, and he feels nothing, but as Abel looks around the plaza at the citizens of Memfi, he can see that, for them, the world is ending. He can see it in the eyes glazed in shock, at the sun-darkened faces gone ashen, at the mouths that move without intelligent speech. For a vertiginous moment, time spins backward. _He is nineteen, and the Gra garrison is turning their lances against their comrades, spilling blood inside the barracks of Altea Castle. He is twenty-four, and a brigade of troops from Aurelis is swarming outside the castle, and Est is screaming. He is twenty-five, and Est is vanishing into the mist. _

The shock is most vivid in the faces of the young people, the ones born after the wars, the ones who have never known anything besides the Hero King and his Unified Kingdom. They do not know, cannot know, how the world can possibly go on. Abel catches sight of the boy who brushed against him in the street, and sees in his face a look of stunned betrayal directed at everything and nothing at once. Time crashes back upon Abel like a wave of cold water. He looks down at the weather-worn backs of his hands and realizes that he has grown old. If he has grown old, then Est... so has she. He is not searching for a girl, or even a young woman. His prize, should he find her, will be a middle-aged woman, her rose-gold hair turning silver, her radiant skin dulled and slender waist thickened. The bell is not counting out the years of the late king's life; it is measuring out every one of Abel's wasted days.

Abel's departure from Memfi is delayed several hours by the chaos in the plaza, as he cannot locate the stable-keeper and retrieve his horse. When the stable-keeper does return to his post, he fumbles with Abel's gold, spilling some of it to the ground. Abel lets the distraught man keep the extra coins out of pity. Abel, with his horse, his sack of effects, and his lance, heads north along the dusty road to Thabes. He stops at each village along the way, and continues with his search almost as before. He visits the shrines and temples, the charnel-houses and burying grounds. He sifts through old records, accosts any longtime resident who looks as though he has some time to spare for a traveler's questions. Yet, those questions have changed; no longer does he ask "Is she here?" but rather, "Did she ever pass this way?"

From Thabes-- ruins when he first beheld it, now rising grandly above the ever-shifting sands-- Abel continues northward still, until the desert turns to a frigid plateau rimmed by snowy peaks. It is days between each outpost of human activity, and the people here speak a form of the Common Tongue so archaic that Abel scarcely understands them. In the northern mountains, he suffers a fall when his horse slips on the ice, and hours pass before a fur-trader finds Abel sprawled out semiconscious with his right leg shattered. His recovery takes the better part of a year, and even then the leg hinders him-- it pains him in the cold, and in his present location, it always is cold. Even so, he does not stop, and boards a ship bound for the most extreme reaches of the kingdom.

Time, suspended for so very long, now hounds him as relentlessly as he chases the memory of Est. He falls again, this time on the ship's deck, and is carried ashore one of the rocky islands that fringe the northern coast of Archanea. The priest who tends this outcrop at the edge of oblivion takes in Abel out of charity, mends his leg and gives him broth and bread and a place to sleep. In the morning, the priest asks his guest for his identity.

"Abel. I was a knight of Altea." He has lied to priests and clerics before, but now, for the first time since Est vanished and took a part of him with her, he makes his confession. Not a full confession by any means, but Abel tells this priest more than he has ever said before. The truth has its own price and sentence; the priest is so delighted to have a hero of the Great Wars in his house that he will not let Abel leave.

"Stay here, for I can see you cannot travel much further. These lonely isles were a desolate place in my youth, but when the king-- may he be praised for ever-- opened the trade routes to the northern realms beyond the sea, we've seen great changes and a better lot for us all."

If he were feeling fit, Abel might ask how the Lonely Isles could possibly be more desolate than they currently are. But the priest is sincere in his praise for the late king.

"He might have come out of Altea, but he cared for every last one of us on this land. I cannot turn away a man who served him. Stay with us, Sir Abel, and consider it our honor that we might sit with you."

These words would once have stirred Abel to flee, but he neither has the physical strength nor the wherewithal to go any place else. So he remains, an honored guest in the priest's house and a prisoner in his own body. He tells himself that he is simply gathering his strength, that once he is well, he will take the next boat off this island. Perhaps he will head south, beginning again in Macedon, and start his journey over. Perhaps he will venture now into Altea, as it has been so long that surely no one knows his face. Perhaps... maybe... tomorrow.

He is no longer searching for Est. He is merely looking for a suitable place to die.

***The End***

Author's Notes: Before anyone screams about Est's hair color, she has orangey-blonde or strawberry blonde hair in the art for _Fire Emblem Gaiden_. As to the rest of it; this is actually intended as a prequel/sidestory to "Homecomings," which exists in this same 'fic universe of mine, aka the "Tales of the Unified Kingdom." All the stories, including this one, can be read separately. The fate of Abel and Est, both of whom "vanish" after FE3 and are never seen again, in Altea or anywhere else, is terribly sad and disturbing. The implication is that Abel pays the price for his treason (fighting against Marth when Est was held hostage by Hardin's goons) by losing Est _and_ everything else in his life. FE3's universe is a harsh one, and I feel it merits exploration.

Memfi = Memphis, as in the former capital of Egypt, just as Thabes clearly equates to ancient Thebes. In-depth notes to be posted on my DA account as usual.


End file.
